“It is a judgment upon you,” said he, nevertheless.
“Do you exult?” she asked indignantly.
“No; but I cannot repress my admiration for the ways of Divine Justice. If you are come to me for advice, I can but suggest that you should follow your brother’s captors to Taunton, and inform the lieutenants of how the letter came into your power.”
She looked at him in anger almost at what seemed a callousness. “Would he believe me, think you?”
“Belike he would not,” said Mr. Wilding. “You can but try.”
“If I told them it was addressed to you,” she said, eyeing him sternly, “does it not occur to you that they would send for you to question you, and that if they did so, as you are a gentleman you could not lie away my brother’s life.”
“Why, yes,” said he quite calmly, “it does occur to me. But does it not occur to you that by the time they came here they would find me gone?” He laughed at her dismay. “I thank you, madam, for this warning,” he added. “I think I’ll bid them saddle for me without delay. Too long already have I tarried.”
“And must Richard hang?” she asked him fiercely.
Mr. Wilding produced a snuffbox of tortoise shell and gold. He opened it deliberately. “If he does, you’ll admit that he will hang on the gallows that he has built himself—although intended for another. I’faith! He’s not the first booby to be caught in his own springe. There is in this a measure of poetic justice. Poetry and justice! Do you know, Ruth, they are two things I have ever loved?” And he took a pinch of choice Bergamot.
“Will you be serious?” she demanded.
“Trenchard would tell you that it were to make an exception from the rule of my life,” he assured her, smiling. “Yet even that might I do at your bidding.”
“But this is a serious matter,” she told him angrily. “For Richard,” he acknowledged, closing his snuffbox with a snap. “Tell me, what would you have me do?”
Since he asked her thus, she answered him in two words. “Save him.”
“At the cost of my own neck?” quoth he. “The price is high,” he reminded her. “Do you think that Richard is quite worth it?”
“And are you to save yourself at the cost of his?” she counter-questioned. “Are you capable of such a baseness?”
He looked at her thoughtfully a moment. “You have not reflected,” said he slowly, “that in this affair is involved more than mine or Richard’s life. There is a great cause weighing in the balance against all personal considerations. If I accounted Richard of more value to Monmouth than I am myself, I should not hesitate in riding to set him free by taking his place. As it is, however, I think I am of the greatest conceivable importance to His Grace, whilst if twenty Richards perished—frankly—their loss would be something of a gain, for Richard has played a traitor’s part already. That is with me the first of all considerations.”
“Am I of no consideration to you?” she asked him. And in an agony of terror for her brother she now approached him, and, obeying a sudden impulse, cast herself upon her knees before him. “Listen!” she cried.
“Not thus,” said he, a frown between his eyes. He took her by the elbows and gently but very firmly brought her to her feet again. “It is not fitting you should kneel save at your prayers.”
She was standing now, and very close to him, his hands still held her elbows, though their touch was so light that she scarce felt it. To release them was easy, and the next second her hands were on his shoulders, her brave eyes raised to him.
“Mr. Wilding,” she implored him, “you’ll not let Richard be destroyed?”
He looked down at her with kindling glance, his arms slipped round her lissom waist. “It is hard to deny you, Ruth,” said he. “Yet not my love of my own life compels me; but my duty, my loyalty to the cause to which I am pledged. I were a traitor were I now to place myself in peril.”
She pressed against him, her face so close to his that her breath fanned his cheek, whither a faint colour crept in quick response. Despite herself almost, instinctively, unconsciously, she exerted the weapons of her sex to bend him to her will.
“You say you love me,” she whispered. “Prove it me now, and I will believe you.
“Ah!” he sighed. “And believing me? What then?”
He had himself grimly in hand, yet feared he should not prove strong enough to hold himself for long.
“You…you shall find me your…dutiful wife,” she faltered, crimsoning.
His arms tightened about her; he crushed her to him, he bent his head to hers and his lips burnt the lips she yielded to him as though they had been living fire.
Anon, she was to weep in shame—in shame and in astonishment—at that instant of surrender, but for the moment she had no thought save for her brother. Exultation filled her. She accounted that she had conquered, and she gloried in the power her beauty gave her, a power that had sufficed to melt to water the hard-frozen purposes of this self-willed man. The next instant, however, she was cold again with dismay and newborn terror. He unclasped her arms, he drew back, shaking off the hands she had rested upon his shoulders. His white face—the flush had faded from it again—smiled a thought disdainfully.
“You bargain with me,” he said. “But I have some knowledge of your ways of trading. They are overshrewd for an honest gentleman.”
“You mean,” she gasped, her hand pressed to her heart, her face a deathly white, “you mean that you’ll not save him?”
“I mean,” said he, “that I will have no further bargains with you.”
There was such hard finality in his tone that she recoiled, beaten and without power, to return to the assault. She had played and lost. She had yielded her lips to his kisses, and—husband though he might be in name—shame was her only guerdon.
One look she gave him from out of that face so white and pitiful, then with a shudder turned from him and fled his presence. He sprang after her as the door closed, then checked and stood in thought, very grim for one who professed to bestow no seriousness on the affairs of life. Then he returned slowly to his writing-table, and rummaged there among the papers with which it was encumbered, seeking something of which he now had need. Through the open window he heard the retreating beat of her horse’s hoofs. He sighed and sat down heavily, to take his long square chin in his hand and stare before him at the sunlight on the lawn outside.
And whilst he sat thus, Ruth made all haste back to Lupton House to tell of the failure that had attended her. There was nothing left her now but to embark upon the forlorn hope of following Richard to Taunton, to offer her evidence of how the incriminating letter had come to be locked in the drawer in which the constable had discovered it. Diana met her with a face as white as her own and infinitely more startled. She had just learnt that Sir Rowland Blake had been arrested also and that he had been carried to Taunton together with Richard, and, as a consequence, she was as eager now that Ruth should repair to Albemarle as she had erstwhile been earnest in urging her to seek out Mr. Wilding; indeed, Diana went so far as to offer to accompany her, an offer that Ruth gladly, gratefully accepted.
Within an hour Ruth and Diana—in spite of all that poor, docile Lady Horton had said to stay them—were riding to Taunton, attended by the same groom who had so lately accompanied his mistress to Zoyland Chase.
CHAPTER X
THEIR OWN PETARD
In a lofty, spacious room of